Category: Experience

I could feel the weight of your tongue heavy with quiet and stories to tell. Perhaps you took my reticence as a sign of aggression, if not suppression toward your identity, but I never intended to trespass against your agency. I just wanted people to see me more than they saw you, and now I have learned that perhaps the two of us cannot be mutually exclusive.

I sat and rhythmically squeezed a smiling, yellow rubber-ball and watched my blood, as dark as shiraz, inflate the flat canvas of a plastic bag.
I was at the Kilasch hospital in Godrej, India on a field trip to study sustainable practices in a small village. We were given a tour of the hospital which was designed with sustainability in mind. When we arrived at the lobotomy lab, our tour guide, Pranav, told us that the hospital was dangerously low on blood donations.

“Can I order something from the menu?” I asked the manager at the Hotel Friends Home hotel in Kathmandu, Nepal.
“I’m sorry, sir, we are not serving lunch or dinner right now because we have to save gas because of the crisis.”
“What crisis?”
“The blockage of imports at the border, sir. We have not received imports from India.”

I still have a lot of learning to do, but I have noticed that there are global context to issues that I have thought to be “American” problems. I haven’t been able to dive into Indian politics, so I can’t really say too much about it, but I’m still a child when it comes to this and I’m still growing and trying to figure it out.